Embedding Mac native widgets into a Scene

[Jasper Potts]

The iOS implementation worked well. Used CALayers to draw over the top of Fx. It synced font and colors etc. made native background transparent. 

Jasper



> On Oct 31, 2014, at 7:52 AM, Stephen F Northover <steve.x.northover at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Mike,
> 
> Embedding native controls in FX runs afoul of the whole lightweight/heavyweight issue.  I had a hack of this once using SWT native controls and I was able to have them appear on Windows because HWND clipping was honored but on Mac, FX drew on top of the native control.  Mac was changed to use CALayers way back for JDK7 and this also made things more complicated.
> 
> Having said all that (from memory), for iOS, there was some work that overlayed an iOS text control in order to use the native keyboard control.  The control was created when editing started and then disposed when editing ended.  This would obviously have the same lightweight/heavyweight issues while editing was happening and a host of other smaller problems (wrong font, jumping, scrolling etc).
> 
> One possible way for this to really work would be to get the native control to render to a texture and get JavaFX to draw the texture. That is just the painting side of the equation.  Events would need to be delivered to this non-painting control as well.  There are operating system calls on Mac that you can use to paint a control to an image so it is in theory doable but a ton of work.
> 
> Steve
> 
>> On 2014-10-31, 9:48 AM, Mike Hearn wrote:
>> JavaFX provides a great set of widgets that are pretty complete, but a few
>> lag behind behind their native counterparts on some platforms. This is
>> especially noticeable with the Mac text field widget, which has things like
>> integrated spelling/grammar checking, auto correct, services, speech
>> recognition and so on.
>> 
>> WebKit manages to expose all this functionality despite that HTML is not
>> the native Mac UI framework. So I am wondering how hard it is for JFX to do
>> the same. However, I know very little about how WebKit does this or how
>> easy it'd be to replicate in the Java world. Are there any experts on the
>> list who could comment?
>